(no subject)

[damselfish]

I am back from Utah! Just in time for a cold front to bring us down into the 50s overnight.

Which was nothing compared to the cold front that hit Park City/Deer Valley. I am going to tell you a story that best takes place in pictures! Of which there aren't many because taking pictures is hard with mittens okay, and since the pictures are huge thanks to my laziness re: resizing, they're all behind a cut.



It snowed a lot the first few days. A big storm actually drove me off the mountain-- you'd think skiing in snow would be easy but those little fat flakes hit you in the face like tiny needles and it is a special brand of misery.

Most skiing is a special brand of misery, I realized, as I curled my toes trying to get feeling back into them and soak up some warmth from my boot heaters, which simply couldn't compete with the temperatures-- not a good year to test new boot heaters, I guess, because most aren't rated for -25 F windchill. It was 8 degrees. ...At the base of the mountain.

The weird weather meant I got to see some interesting things, though. They were also blowing snow which blocked off some of my favorite runs, and I had one adventure where I couldn't see five feet in front of my face (is this whiteness the ground? The fog? A cliff? Who knows!), but there were also pretty steady sun dogs throughout the trip.

What's a sun dog? This is:



Actually it's the little lights next to the sun, but it creates a halo and two "parallel" suns.

There aren't many things in my life I'm passionate about, I don't think, so as I sat there wiggling my fingers in my mittens I had the realization that I must really love to ski if I'm willing to put up with this much pain to go sailing down the mountain at extreme speed.

I don't know what changed about me between this year and last, but last year I was timid and uncertain. This year I took a ski tour by accident (the guy on the chairlift asked "how'd you hear about the tour?" "What tour?" "...The tour group you're taking the lift with.") and they flew down the slopes, so I had to keep up. The next thing I knew I was zooming down the mountain on my own, too, probably clocking a good 30 - 40 mph on some runs.

This, of course, was made easier by the time of year: it's the first year we didn't go between Christmas and New Years, and I've never seen the mountain so empty or the snow so nice. The cold helped. Apparently the really snobby skiers (and let's face it, Deer Valley may be a much friendlier place than Aspen, but the prices are comparable) won't go out when it's cold because they don't want to be "puffy."

Fuck, everybody's puffy when you ski, that's the beauty of it!



Here I am, deeply unconcerned with the puffiness of my many layers. Though I actually took the picture because I want you to see these skis.

I usually ski with 144 cm skis. Every year the tips have been getting wider and wider, but this year they gave me some Rossignols with tips like shovels (my god looook at them). I kept knocking them together like a virgin's knees at prom. I couldn't figure out if I was holding parallel or what. So I went down and demanded other skis that are not shaped like boats and ended up with the S3s that you see in the picture above.

Notice that they are 159 cm. I'm 4'11. 159 cm = 62 inches whereas 4'11 = 59 inches.

They were some of the best skis I ever used. The Temptations got a lot of praise on the mountain but everyone said "it took me a while to get used to them" and they're probably exactly the ski I want. If I had time to get used to them. As it stands I enjoyed these new ones, and the rocker tips mean you send up a giant rooster spray behind you.

I spent the first day coming and going from the base: getting another undershirt. Getting a ski mask. Getting new skis. Fixing my boots. Fixing my heaters.

Finally! I was set.



And man, was it pretty.

This is similar to a picture I took last year, except that one was taken around New Year's and this one around January 10th. What a difference it makes.